What the New Year Might Ask of Us

As the year has been winding down, a lot of the conversations I’ve been having in session have naturally turned toward reflection—looking back at what this year held, what it took, and what it asked people to survive. And for many, 2025 hasn’t been a light year. There has been real grief, layered loss, political disillusionment, and a kind of quiet exhaustion that doesn’t always show up shapes how people are entering the new year. Even when growth or progress can be named, it’s often followed by an awareness of how much that growth cost. As the new year approaches, I keep sitting with a question that feels less about motivation and more about care: how do we prepare for what a new year might ask of us when the last one took so much out of us?

For many of us, the end of the year hasn’t brought a sense of closure, but loss, and the need to adjust to what’s been taken and to adjust to who we are now because of it. The holidays, in particular, have meant noticing who isn’t there anymore and figuring out how to move through familiar moments that now feel different. In my work, I’ve also seen clients spend the season navigating immigration threats, job loss and insecurity, financial uncertainty, and the disorienting experience of searching for stability in systems that no longer seem able to provide it. While these experiences may look different on the surface, they carry a shared undercurrent of grief and loss. As the new year approaches, many of us are still recalibrating our lives, adjusting to changes that have reshaped how we understand ourselves and our place in the world.

I’ve been moving through that recalibration myself. This year has taken a lot from me as well, through loss and change, and through a growing awareness that the way I had been working was no longer something I could sustain and stay well. Over the past few weeks, that recognition has shaped how I’ve been preparing for the new year, scaling back, restructuring, and rethinking how I plan my work and pace my days. Preparation has looked like slowing down, backtracking where needed, and ordering my steps in ways that support my health and make it possible to keep going without asking more than I can give. Sitting with that has made it easier to see what the coming year will require, not just from me, but from many of us.

2026 may require something different because of how much the past year has already asked of us. Many of us are carrying losses we’re still adjusting to, disappointments that changed how we see things, and a level of fatigue that built slowly over time. Some are still dealing with the aftereffects of choices they had to make under pressure. Even when there has been progress, it often came through necessity, doing what had to be done, figuring things out as we went, staying afloat rather than moving with any real sense of ease. When we think about a new year from that place, preparation begins to feel less like the need to plan ahead and more like the need to take an honest look at where we actually are, what we’re carrying, what we’re still recovering from, and what we have the capacity to offer right now.

Taking an honest look at what we have the capacity to offer right now has meant, for some, coming to terms with the limits of control we actually have. Recently, while reflecting on her progress and the work we’ve been doing together, a client shared that she’s learning to let what she calls the calm moments be calm. Over the past few months, we’ve spent time naming how she has been using worry as a way to try to prepare herself, even though it doesn’t actually prepare her for what’s coming, and it doesn’t prevent hard things from happening. Staying focused on what might come next means she misses the restoration that calm can bring. Allowing herself to remain there, without being pulled ahead of herself by anxiety, has become part of how she’s caring for herself as she moves forward.

For another client, that same vigilance has been shaped more directly by grief. After a year marked by loss, she found herself staying on high alert almost without realizing it, as if moving quickly toward healing might protect her from the pain. Over time, our work has shifted toward giving herself permission to grieve without a timeline. Slowing down, letting herself cry, and allowing the messiness of grief to take up space has become the way she’s caring for herself now, as an honest response to what this year has taken from her, and to what it has asked of her since.

This is where a lot of us seem to be right now. Because of that, preparation in this season may require less effort and resolve, and more permission to move slowly. Permission to stop rushing toward a version of ourselves that looks okay on the outside, and to be honest about what we actually have the energy for right now. After a year like this, what the new year might ask of us feels less about resolution and more about rest and recovery.